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"\n\nThe Lego Movie is not for children. Well, it is, but it&amp;amp;#x2019;s also for us\u2014the grown-ups who loved playing with Legos as kids; who are ready to accept Morgan Freeman as their God; and whose minds will be blown away when they are wide-eyed during this so-called &amp;amp;#x201C;kid&amp;amp;#x2019;s movie&amp;amp;#x201D; and find themselves laughing, like really laughing, for 100 minutes.\n\nWe rang up directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord\u2014the same guys who brought you the 21 Jump Street reboot and will bring you the sequel, 22 Jump Street, this summer\u2014to find out how they pulled it off.\n\n\n\nHow did the project start?\n\n Phil Lord: We had a lot of skepticism because we felt like, Oh, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s got a danger of becoming a 90-minute commercial for a toy, and that would be scary to work on. The more we thought about it we started looking online at the sort of grassroots stuff that you can do\u2014they make brick stones, they make their own designs\u2014and we started thinking about it as a homemade, more populist movie. It started to seem really punk rock to use this format, to make something that felt really homemade and DIY, and so we pitched them that version thinking they&amp;amp;#x2019;ll never go for it. Like, Let&amp;amp;#x2019;s do this not-slick, dorky version\u2014I guess they were desperate.\n\nChristopher Miller: We said really early on it couldn&amp;amp;#x2019;t feel like it was coming from a company, like it was trying to sell toys. It had to be something that felt like it came from outside that was just using Legos as a medium like the Claymation movies using clay.\n\nWhat was the process like?\n\n CM: It&amp;amp;#x2019;s very long and slow and intricate, unfortunately.\n\nPL: So it&amp;amp;#x2019;s really fun!\n\nCM: We rewrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it and tweaked it the entire time until a few weeks ago. The thing that&amp;amp;#x2019;s great about Lego is the possibilities are infinite, you can take a bucket of bricks and make a house or a dinosaur or a spaceship or a dinosaur-spaceship-house, it can be anything and so that was both daunting and exciting. But trying to tell a story that you care about that&amp;amp;#x2019;s fun and is funny and has a good narrative drive was a real challenge.\n\nThis is a &amp;amp;#x201C;kid&amp;amp;#x2019;s movie&amp;amp;#x201D; that will make the adults in the theater laugh as much, if not harder\u2014is that something you strive for?\n\n PL: We mostly don&amp;amp;#x2019;t. We basically just try to make it funny for us and our friends and luckily our sense of humor is so juvenile that children relate to it as well.\n\nCM: Basically we approach it the exact same way that we approach like an R-rated comedy like we did 21 Jump Street; only difference is swear words.\n\nDid you have to do any Lego-related research?\n\n PL: We we went to Billund, Denmark, which is a very tiny town where basically the only thing that happens is people go to Legoland and people make Lego bricks. We went to their museum and the crazy factory that&amp;amp;#x2019;s filled with delightful robots that make those Lego bricks and all the designers are there and there&amp;amp;#x2019;s just a lot of creativity around and it was really inspiring for us.\n\nAs kids, did you guys play with Legos?\n\n CM: Oh, yeah. We both were into Lego as kids; even though we&amp;amp;#x2019;re super cool and popular dudes, we found time to build elaborate space stuff with the Classic Space set, which happened to coincidentally be both of our favorite set growing up. The character in the movie Benny, the 1980-something space guy, is based straight out of my collection. I had a blue spaceman that was like the lead of my stories I was telling and had a cracked helmet and everything\u2014it turned out that was a common thing that a lot of people seemed to experience and when we put that in the trailer, a lot of people online were like, &amp;amp;#x201C;Oh my god! My spaceguy had a cracked chinstrap in his helmet, that&amp;amp;#x2019;s crazy.&amp;amp;#x201D;\n\nIf you guys could dream up a fantasy Lego piece or set, what would it be?\n\n CM: We just built every single thing from our imagination and our imagination has now run dry.\n\nPL: Yeah, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s over.\n\nCM: It&amp;amp;#x2019;s all there on the screen!\n\nPL: Literally, all I can build is an empty box at this point.\n\nHave you been able to get the song &amp;amp;#x201C;Everything Is Awesome&amp;amp;#x201D;\u2014the insanely catchy song by Tegan and Sara with The Lonely Island that opens the film\u2014out of your heads?\n\n PL: It wears off after two or three days and then something will happen. My girlfriend will sing it and I&amp;amp;#x2019;ll be like, &amp;amp;#x201C;Baby, don&amp;amp;#x2019;t! What are you doing? Stop it!&amp;amp;#x201D;\n\nCM: Or someone will just say the word everything or awesome and it will trigger Vietnam-style flashbacks. This was one of the situations where you write something and you think, Well that&amp;amp;#x2019;s kind of impossible, and then it happens. We wrote in the script, Emmet turns on the radio and the song Everything Is Awesome, which is the most insanely catchy, cheesy, super happy pop song comes on. And it just happens to be one of those things where it climbs into your brain through your earhole and sets up camp forever.\n\nAnything about 22 Jump Street that you can share with us?\n\n &amp;amp;#xE2;&amp;amp;#x80;&amp;amp;#x8B;CM: I can say that there is, it&amp;amp;#x2019;s even crazier than the first one, there&amp;amp;#x2019;s more action and it goes to places that the first one didn&amp;amp;#x2019;t. Ice Cube is in a lot more of it. He goes out in the field. The first one was sort of trying to tweak bromances and buddy cop movies and this one is doing for sequels what the first one did for that. If you start playing Dark Side of the Moon at the Columbia lady it matches up every so often.\n\nPL: If you play the soundtrack for 21 Jump Street right when the Columbia lady shows up in 22 Jump Street it&amp;amp;#x2019;ll match up every so often."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/lego-movie-christopher-miller-phil-lord>